Day: August 3, 2012

What exactly is Romney trying to hide? Does he truly believe that he can run his entire campaign on secrecy and lies up until election day? Yes, there are some myopic voters who, although they’re voting against their own economic interest, will vote for Romney because Rush, Hannity, et al tells them to. However, the majority of voters know better and this secrecy strategy will come back to haunt Romney in the General Election.

Republicans are playing right into Harry Reid’s hands but they’re too puffed up with the smug, bellicose inhaling of conservative media to know it. They’re all excited that Mitt Romney told Reid to “put up or shut up” about Romney’s tax returns.

Let’s just take a moment here to think about that. Who needs to put up or shut up? Romney is the one running for president and refusing to do the most basic qualification of the job as a candidate. For some reason, no matter how politically costly it is, Romney is too scared to release his tax returns. He gave us one year, which his own father pointed out could easily be distorted. He promises to give us another year, but it’s August already.

Romney can manage to squeak out a few tough talking sound bites on Hannity’s show:

“It’s time for Harry to put up or shut up. Harry’s gonna have to describe who it is he spoke with because of course that’s totally and completely wrong. It’s untrue, dishonest and inaccurate. It’s wrong. So I’m looking forward to have Harry reveal his sources and we’ll probably find out that it’s the White House.”

Wow, what’s that about dishonest attacks? Romney is blaming the White House now for Reid’s alleged knowledge of Romney’s taxes? Where is Romney’s proof of this allegation — does he even have an “unnamed source” or was he just throwing some paranoia at the Hannity and hoping it would stick? Someone is getting desperate to deflect.

Romney is a weak candidate who has been labeled a wimp by Newsweek and worse than Sarah Palin by the British press. When he tells Reid to put up or shut up, he obviously doesn’t know who he’s dealing with — but even more bizarre, it’s almost as if Romney is talking for us to him.

A birther organization known as the Conservative Majority Fund is currently running a national ad campaign claiming that it can disqualify President Obama from running for reelection. While the ad is steeped in the rhetoric of the birther movement, it goes far beyond simply claiming that Obama was not born in the United States. Indeed, the ad manages to cram a truly stunning number of far right conspiracy theories into just one minute of air time:

Who is Barack Obama? We know less about this man than any other President in American history. What’s he hiding? His autobiography is full of fictional characters. But there’s a lot more than that. If you try to look into his past, you run into a brick wall.

His college records at Columbia, sealed! His college records at Harvard, sealed! We don’t know what his thesis papers were about because those are sealed too. He Selective Service record is sealed. His records as an attorney are sealed. He has a Connecticut Social Security number and we can’t get answers about that either.

And no one — I mean no one — has seen an actual physical copy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

The fact is, if we don’t know who Barack Obama is, we shouldn’t even have him as a candidate for president. Let’s disqualify Obama before the Democratic National Convention. Call today to sign the demand to disqualify Obama. . . .We need 10,000 signatures from every congressional district to boot this guy off the ballot and have the Democrats nominate someone else.

The ad identifies no actual legal basis for its claim that a sitting president can be forced to give up his reelection bid if enough of his political opponents sign a petition.

The Conservative Majority Fund only filed its initial papers with the Federal Elections Commission a month ago, and has not yet disclosed the extent of its spending on this ad. Their spending is significant enough, however, that the ad ran simultaneously on both CNN and Fox News this morning, and it is twice the length of a normal campaign ad.